Never mind costs, feel the quality

摘要

A keen interest in the precise way that GDP is measured is usually confined to official number-crunchers and nerdy economists. But when the numbers in the national accounts started to pose awkward questions about whether Labour's big spending spree was delivering value for money, ministers started to take a keen interest. Sir Tony Atkinson, an economist at Oxford University, was asked to investigate why government productivity appeared to be plummeting.